


Unpacking

by ncfan



Series: Fictober 2018 [6]
Category: Herbert West - Reanimator - H. P. Lovecraft
Genre: Fictober, Fictober 2018, Gen, M/M, Yet more fluff for another prompt fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-02 09:12:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16302320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: When it comes to a new house, part of waiting entails unpacking. And unpacking entails old memories. [Written for Fictober 2018]





	Unpacking

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt, “You think this troubles me?”

The house in Bolton had needed to have all of its locks and most of its windows replaced. There was a draft whose source no one could pinpoint, the floorboards on the second floor creaked ominously whenever weight was applied to them, and the back door didn’t fit right on the frame and had to be forced open after rain. On the other hand, it was fairly remote from other houses, the potter’s field was within walking distance and there were no houses between this one and it, and the floor of the basement was brick rather than rough earth, and the basement itself fairly dry and spacious. This covered up a multitude of sins, and Herbert could forgive the house its deficiencies as a living space so long as it continued to serve as a workspace.

And since Stephen was still complaining about the draft, well… He’d keep looking for the source. If it let in air, it would likely let in water as well. No sense in letting mold grow, no sense in exposing them to a potential source of sickness. This was supposed to be their practice as well as their home, after all.

If Herbert’s poking around the factory district had yielded up accurate results, he suspected they wouldn’t have any trouble attracting regular patients. Whether or not they’d be able to attract patients who could actually afford to pay their bill at the time of service (or in anything resembling a timely fashion) was another question entirely, but if they made enough to cover their own bills and the costs of materials, Herbert supposed he would have to live with it. Poor people didn’t become ill at any lesser rate than those of greater means, and they still needed care. Tardy payments were to become a necessary evil.

Besides which, this was… It was odd to say that this wasn’t his truest work. Shouldn’t be said, shouldn’t be thought about, in case someone was able to discern it from his manner. (He suspected he knew how a patient would respond to a doctor who cared less for their living body than he did the fresh corpses being laid to rest in the potter’s field down the road. It wouldn’t be… That wasn’t true, was it?)

It was hardly as if the work he was doing above ground wasn’t real. He could hardly have imagined Mrs. Górka commenting disparagingly on the as-yet dismantled state of their kitchen when she stopped by to see how the place was coming along (And judging by the look on her face, she seemed to have hardly imagined he was going to agree with her, but such is life). It was real, and necessary for so many different reasons, and until he and Stephen could lay hands on a corpse that fit the proper criteria, it was his only work.

Now, the only thing to do was wait. And part of waiting entailed unpacking.

“I don’t remember seeing—“ standing in the doorway of the room, Stephen gestured at the boxes lying out on the floor of what was to be Herbert’s bedroom “— _any_ of this when you were living in the boarding house.”

“Well, of course not,” Herbert said absently, as he took a stack of books out of one of the boxes and headed towards the bookcase pressed up against the far wall of the room. “It would have been a distraction.”

A quickly swallowed-back laugh followed that, and Herbert craned his neck to look suspiciously at him. “And what is that about?”

Stephen’s eyes still glimmered faintly with mirth as he shook his head. “Nothing. I was just trying to imagine you being distracted by anything without it being purposeful.”

“You’d… be surprised.”

“Shocked, more like.”

Stephen crossed the threshold into that room with an ease that provoked a commingled mess of discomfort and pleasure that Herbert pushed back viciously. He raised an eyebrow as Stephen opened up one of the boxes himself. “Don’t you have unpacking of your own to do?”

“No.” More books, it looked like, though there was a metallic clink that suggested at something else. “I finished up with my own things while you were off chatting with the locals.”

“It’s not _chatting_ , Stephen.” And the fact that that was what it had eventually devolved into, just to keep from angering whichever old lady could have poisoned their prospects before they even started—Herbert might not have cared at all about burning bridges in Arkham (it had been so good to finally see the back of Arkham), but this was different—kept his tone fairly mild, though the accusation might have rankled. “The house is remote. I just needed to make sure people even knew we were here.”

Another laugh, and this time Stephen didn’t bother trying to hide it. “I know that, Herbert.”

Herbert didn’t shoo him away. If he was being honest with himself, he needed the help—the sun was already starting to sink towards the horizon, and if he kept on by himself, he’d still be doing this by gaslight. Sending Stephen out felt… wrong. He couldn’t pinpoint the source of that wrongness, any more than he could pinpoint the source of the house’s persistent draft or the faint smell of rosemary that rose up from stray corners on the ground floor (For the latter, at least, he suspected the last homeowner had been too fond of her perfume). Just a desire not to be alone, rootless and voiceless, a presence like a shadow, something intangible and untouched.

Not that there was truly a multitude of belongings to be unpacked and put away. Herbert was hardly what anyone would call a magpie; the only thing he’d ever cared to buy in abundance was books, and his lack of time and lack of funds not tied up in other things meant that he rarely had opportunity to indulge the desire. Not that he thought he’d have much more opportunity now. Factory workers were an accident-prone lot.

“Herbert, I’ve found some photographs.” More clinking of what Herbert now knew to be tin. “Where do you want me to put them?”

He’d been wondering where those were. “Just give them to me.” Herbert didn’t look at Stephen’s face as he held out a hand for the pair of photographs—there were only two, he’d only kept two—instead staring intently down at the contents of the box he was sorting through. And when he was handed the photographs, he didn’t bother to look at them before going over to his desk to put them away.

“You keep your photographs in a _desk drawer_?” He heard the creak of the floorboards rather than saw Stephen walk over to stand next to him. “I would have thought you’d want them sitting out.”

Photographs were an interesting thing, the way they could sink hooks into the mind and coil themselves around memory, the way a strangling vine would start its work on a tree. Herbert wondered if Stephen had ever noticed the pull they exerted, or if that was something that existed only inside of him, and was part of the human experience nowhere else.

Herbert shrugged. “If I want to look at them, they’re well within reach. Otherwise, they’re a distraction.”

He used to keep them out. When he’d done that, there had been an afternoon where he stared for an hour before he realized what he was doing. A distraction, indeed.

“That’s an interesting way to talk about pictures of your family.” He sucked in a quiet, startled breath. “And color photographs, too; I’ve never seen one before. This is your family, isn’t it?”

Herbert put one of the photographs away. The tin frame felt older and rougher against his hands than it had the last time he’d handled it; how many years had it been that he’d kept them both shoved in the back of a wardrobe or in the very bottom of a steamer trunk, buried under clothes and books and other minutiae? Perhaps it was rusted, but he didn’t look at it to check.

But Stephen took hold of the other one before Herbert could lay hands on it, and pulled it out of reach. “Who’s this?” he asked, as though it was a perfectly simple, perfectly harmless question. “Your parents?”

Herbert finally looked at the photograph at the same time he frowned sharply. It wasn’t the one with him in it, at least. “Of course not,” he muttered as he eyed the elderly couple and bit back a sigh. “Those were my paternal grandparents. You’re not going to find any photographs of my parents in any of these boxes.”

When it had come time to sort what he wanted to keep and what was to be gotten rid of—he was, on his father’s side, the only child of an only child, so most of that decision was made by him and him alone—it had shocked nearly everyone involved, the way he showed so little attachment to those photographs. But they were just images, already beginning to fade from too much exposure to the sun, and he didn’t want them. They couldn’t speak to him, couldn’t touch him, couldn’t hold him. He thought one of his uncles might have kept a few; his mother _was_ their sister, after all. And since they knew her, perhaps they derived some meaning from it. For him, there was no point.

(The ones he’d kept, he’d wanted. There was no point to that, either, since he could remember his grandparents’ faces with no difficulty, but oh, well. There were many things in life that made no sense.)

“Were you close?” There was a softening in his voice that Herbert recognized, something that made his skin prickle unsettlingly.

“They raised me.” A simplified version of events, but still accurate. “We loved each other. I should hope so.”

As Herbert kept on unpacking the box, this seemed to have given Stephen some pause. “ _They_ raised—“ Herbert slid a few books onto the bookshelf, and listened to the floorboards creak under the weight of moving feet. A hand fell on his back and out of the corner of his eye he could see Stephen craning his neck to try to look into his face. “God, Herbert, I’m sorry.”

Stephen’s hand carried a tingling warmth that carried through layers of clothing, and something about that hand and those words made Herbert shake. Then that hand on his back became an arm looping around his shoulders and drawing him in flush against Stephen’s side, and how he hated the way his voice shook when he asked testily, “You think this troubles me?”

“If you want me to believe you aren’t troubled—“ the words vibrated against Herbert’s right shoulder, and Stephen’s arm on Herbert’s shoulders was softly warm “—try acting like it. What’s wrong?”

Reticence asserted itself automatically, which given the present state of their relationship was thoroughly ridiculous—or maybe it wasn’t ridiculous at all.

How to explain what he had done after both of his grandparents were consigned to the earth, how he had extricated himself from the mutilating touch of his mutilated family tree, and behaved like an utter coward afterwards and never determined whether he was still whole after the extraction? How to explain that he’d shut himself off from that, preferring isolation to going back to that mutilating touch?

“They’re long-buried.” That touch was wonderful, and he couldn’t stand to pull away from it. When he looked up into Stephen’s face, just for a moment, that utterly normal concern made him feel as if something inside had cracked and split open. He could at least speak without his voice shaking, though, even if it sounded brittle to his own ears. Something small to latch onto, but something, nonetheless. “Nothing’s wrong. I just dislike speaking of it.”

And now he had opened the door again, he had done it to himself, and didn’t regret it as much as he ought. Death picked off the living senselessly, and life dealt strange hands to those who thought they knew what paths they were walking on. It was the new house, the promise of privacy. It was the arm on his back, the hand resting on his left shoulder. It was that pain, if much sweeter than he remembered.


End file.
